I should accentuate the positive. As a long-time Windows user seeking to extend the life of an old PIII SONY Vaio with 256MB RAM max-d out, I installed VL 5.9 standard (Gold) and in dual-boot config with Windows using lilo. The desktop experience is much faster.However, my Belkin PCMCIA Wireless adapter FSD-7010 isn't seen as WLAN0 nor is it able to communicate with the access point--much less get the desired dhcp addrress. I first used ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.sys then followed by the correct ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf in the location where both the driver and .inf file lived. bcmwl5 was installed...bcmwl5.sys was not. I followed the excellent instructions by Granny Geek including creating the alias wlan0 ndiswrapper in the modprobe.conf file in both deprecated /etc location and preferred /etc/modprobe.d locations. Ran depmod -aq and modprobe ndiswrapper commands.

First, I had tried running vlwifi. It found eth0 as the wireless interface and offered to set it up. After I entered the SSID, WEP key, and cofigured with dhcp to run at startup, the response was 'failed - could not obtain an address for wireless interface eth0.'

Reran the vlwifi utility after running modprobe -r ndiswrapper, but no luck. Still not able to create dhcp address on the eth1 wireless interface. Interestingly, the LED's on the pcmcia wireless card illuminate during the vlwifi setup process, but snuff out after the dhcp error message. Just out of curiosity, isn't the wireless interface supposed to be wlan0 ? Why is VL seeing it as eth1 ?

Reran the vlwifi utility after running modprobe -r ndiswrapper, but no luck. Still not able to create dhcp address on the eth1 wireless interface. Interestingly, the LED's on the pcmcia wireless card illuminate during the vlwifi setup process, but snuff out after the dhcp error message. Just out of curiosity, isn't the wireless interface supposed to be wlan0 ? Why is VL seeing it as eth1 ?

How do you perform updates?

The wireless device can be one of several device names: eth#, wlan#, ath#. I believe that devices setup using ndiswrapper will become wlan# devices; however, this is not always the case. Atheros-chip devices are often identified as ath# devices; however, this is not always the case. And often times wireless devices are simply an eth# device.

I also use a broadcom-based pcmcia wireless adapter on VL 5.9 STD with WPA security, and have never needed to use anything but the bcm43xx driver and wpa_supplicant. I use static ip addressing so I'm not overly familiar with dhcpd, but it's pretty standard and should be able to handle ip addressing without many problems.

You've been given lots of advice on different directions to travel so I won't throw in another, but as bigpaws has stated, you shouldn't have needed to add anything to your base system to get your adapter working.

I ran the rmmod and modprobe commands you suggested then tried vlwifi. It asked if I wanted to use Win driver. I pointed it to the directory containing both the bcmwl5.sys and bcmwl5.inf files. However, it didn't recognize the card. Same with wifi-radar.

You can't just obtain the module from Vector Linux 6. You basically have to upgrade your entire OS. The newer module requires a newer kernel which is built against newer libraries with a newer compiler. You get the picture.

Download the iso and reinstall. This isn't the only improvement in the new version of VL. It's a big step forward.

I ran the rmmod and modprobe commands you suggested then tried vlwifi. It asked if I wanted to use Win driver. I pointed it to the directory containing both the bcmwl5.sys and bcmwl5.inf files. However, it didn't recognize the card. Same with wifi-radar.

What are the steps to obtain and load the 6.0 RC1 module?

Any other suggestions?

If you attempt a connection from the cli instead the VLWifi graphic user interface, we could get some useful error messages.Please do this from a terminal as root: